James Joyce: An Encounter

IT WAS Joe Dillon who introduced the Wild West to us. He had a little library made up of old numbers of The Union Jack , Pluck and The Halfpenny Marvel . Every evening after school we met in his back garden and arranged Indian battles. He and his fat young brother Leo, the idler, held the loft of the stable while we tried to carry it by storm; or we fought a pitched battle on the grass. But, however well we fought, we never won siege or battle and all our bouts ended with Joe Dillon’s war dance of victory. His parents went to eight-o’clock mass every morning in Gardiner Street and the peaceful odour of Mrs. Dillon was prevalent in the hall of the house. But he played too fiercely for us who were younger and more timid. He looked like some kind of an Indian when he capered round the garden, an old tea-cosy on his head, beating a tin with his fist and yelling:

“Ya! yaka, yaka, yaka!”

Everyone was incredulous when it was reported that he had a vocation for the priesthood. Nevertheless it was true.

A spirit of unruliness diffused itself among us and, under its influence, differences of culture and constitution were waived. We banded ourselves together, some boldly, some in jest and some almost in fear: and of the number of these latter, the reluctant Indians who were afraid to seem studious or lacking in robustness, I was one. The adventures related in the literature of the Wild West were remote from my nature but, at least, they opened doors of escape. I liked better some American detective stories which were traversed from time to time by unkempt fierce and beautiful girls. Though there was nothing wrong in these stories and though their intention was sometimes literary they were circulated secretly at school. One day when Father Butler was hearing the four pages of Roman History clumsy Leo Dillon was discovered with a copy of The Halfpenny Marvel .

“This page or this page? This page Now, Dillon, up! ‘Hardly had the day’ … Go on! What day? ‘Hardly had the day dawned’ … Have you studied it? What have you there in your pocket?”

Everyone’s heart palpitated as Leo Dillon handed up the paper and everyone assumed an innocent face. Father Butler turned over the pages, frowning.

“What is this rubbish?” he said. “The Apache Chief! Is this what you read instead of studying your Roman History? Let me not find any more of this wretched stuff in this college. The man who wrote it, I suppose, was some wretched fellow who writes these things for a drink. I’m surprised at boys like you, educated, reading such stuff. I could understand it if you were … National School boys. Now, Dillon, I advise you strongly, get at your work or…”

This rebuke during the sober hours of school paled much of the glory of the Wild West for me and the confused puffy face of Leo Dillon awakened one of my consciences. But when the restraining influence of the school was at a distance I began to hunger again for wild sensations, for the escape which those chronicles of disorder alone seemed to offer me. The mimic warfare of the evening became at last as wearisome to me as the routine of school in the morning because I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad.

The summer holidays were near at hand when I made up my mind to break out of the weariness of schoollife for one day at least. With Leo Dillon and a boy named Mahony I planned a day’s miching. Each of us saved up sixpence. We were to meet at ten in the morning on the Canal Bridge. Mahony’s big sister was to write an excuse for him and Leo Dillon was to tell his brother to say he was sick. We arranged to go along the Wharf Road until we came to the ships, then to cross in the ferryboat and walk out to see the Pigeon House. Leo Dillon was afraid we might meet Father Butler or someone out of the college; but Mahony asked, very sensibly, what would Father Butler be doing out at the Pigeon House. We were reassured: and I brought the first stage of the plot to an end by collecting sixpence from the other two, at the same time showing them my own sixpence. When we were making the last arrangements on the eve we were all vaguely excited. We shook hands, laughing, and Mahony said:

“Till tomorrow, mates!”

That night I slept badly. In the morning I was firstcomer to the bridge as I lived nearest. I hid my books in the long grass near the ashpit at the end of the garden where nobody ever came and hurried along the canal bank. It was a mild sunny morning in the first week of June. I sat up on the coping of the bridge admiring my frail canvas shoes which I had diligently pipeclayed overnight and watching the docile horses pulling a tramload of business people up the hill. All the branches of the tall trees which lined the mall were gay with little light green leaves and the sunlight slanted through them on to the water. The granite stone of the bridge was beginning to be warm and I began to pat it with my hands in time to an air in my head. I was very happy.

When I had been sitting there for five or ten minutes I saw Mahony’s grey suit approaching. He came up the hill, smiling, and clambered up beside me on the bridge. While we were waiting he brought out the catapult which bulged from his inner pocket and explained some improvements which he had made in it. I asked him why he had brought it and he told me he had brought it to have some gas with the birds. Mahony used slang freely, and spoke of Father Butler as Old Bunser. We waited on for a quarter of an hour more but still there was no sign of Leo Dillon. Mahony, at last, jumped down and said:

“Come along. I knew Fatty’d funk it.”

“And his sixpence…?” I said.

“That’s forfeit,” said Mahony. “And so much the better for us — a bob and a tanner instead of a bob.”

We walked along the North Strand Road till we came to the Vitriol Works and then turned to the right along the Wharf Road. Mahony began to play the Indian as soon as we were out of public sight. He chased a crowd of ragged girls, brandishing his unloaded catapult and, when two ragged boys began, out of chivalry, to fling stones at us, he proposed that we should charge them. I objected that the boys were too small and so we walked on, the ragged troop screaming after us: “Swaddlers! Swaddlers!” thinking that we were Protestants because Mahony, who was dark-complexioned, wore the silver badge of a cricket club in his cap. When we came to the Smoothing Iron we arranged a siege; but it was a failure because you must have at least three. We revenged ourselves on Leo Dillon by saying what a funk he was and guessing how many he would get at three o’clock from Mr. Ryan. …
From Dubliners

Who’s ever heard Virginia Woolf?

Hearing the voice of a long-dead writer adds another dimension to a reader’s connection with an author’s work, not profound, but intimate. It can also be surprising. Many years ago, I was jolted by a record of James Joyce reading a delirious passage from Finnegans Wake, an often incomprehensible but nevertheless enchanting experiment.

Until then, Joyce had existed for me only as words on the page. He was disembodied, the pure spirit of the English language at one of its greater moments. I was therefore astonished to hear him speaking much like a stage Irishman, rather in the style of Barry Fitzgerald, who played a series of lovable priests and cops in Hollywood films. Joyce’s accent made it clear that even late in life he remained intensely grounded in Dublin, the city he escaped before unfolding his genius. That subtly changed my feelings about him. It made him more local, more obviously the magnificent product of one particular time and place. “All talent is clannish,” said Isaac Bashevis Singer. Joyce was triumphantly clannish, and never more than in his speech.

For those of us who enjoy this kind of contact, Richard Fairman of the British Library has been rooting through his sound archives to make collections of authorial speech, most recently in a three-CD set, The Spoken Word: British Writers ( http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/sound.html),an assortment of utterances by 30 writers. Today, when every interesting author gets recorded often, it’s surprising to learn from Fairman that there is exactly one known recording of Arthur Conan Doyle’s voice extant, and also only one of Virginia Woolf’s. They both lived well into the age of sound recording (Conan Doyle died in 1930, Woolf in 1941) but the idea of preserving voices hadn’t yet taken hold among broadcasters and librarians. Read more.

Joyce’s Death and Wake

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (Irish Séamus Seoighe; 2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish expatriate writer, widely considered to be one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. He is best known for his landmark novel Ulysses (1922) and its highly controversial successor Finnegans Wake (1939), as well as the short story collection Dubliners (1914) and the semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).Although he spent most of his adult life outside Ireland, Joyce's psychological and fictional universe is firmly rooted in his native Dublin — the city which provides the settings and much of the subject matter for all his fiction. In particular, his tempestuous early relationship with the Irish Roman Catholic Church is reflected through a similar inner conflict in his recurrent alter ego Stephen Dedalus. As the result of his minute attentiveness to a personal locale and his self-imposed exile and influence throughout Europe, (notably in Paris, France), Joyce became paradoxically one of the most cosmopolitan yet one of the most regionally-focused of all the English language writers of his time.

From Today’s Story

On this day in 1941 James Joyce died in Zurich at the age of fifty-eight, from peritonitis brought on by a perforated ulcer. Even without the dislocation of WWII, Joyce’s last years were beset with difficulties — the schizophrenia of his daughter, his son’s floundering career and broken marriage, his own poor health, ongoing battles over Ulysses and new worries about Finnegans Wake. “Though not so blind as Homer, and not so exiled as Dante,” writes biographer Richard Ellmann, “he had reached his life’s nadir.”

Most troubling to Joyce was Lucia. He had shuffled her from doctor to doctor and clinic to clinic looking for some sort of hope, or some support for his refusal to accept the bleak conclusions at which everyone but him eventually arrived. Latest on this list was Carl Jung, and his attempts to treat Lucia in the mid-1930s had ended with the double diagnosis that she and her father were like two people heading to the bottom of a river, one falling and the other diving. Joyce had a psychological style that was “definitely schizophrenic,” however reclaimed or transformed his books were by literary genius: “In any other time of the past Joyce’s work would never have reached the printer, but in our blessed XXth century it is a message, though not yet understood.”

Joyce was in the home stretch on the seventeen-year Finnegans Wake at this point. In the text he could be jocular about the doctors — “grisly old Sykos” who pronounce “on ‘alices, when they were yung and easily freudened” — but in private he despaired. Whatever the improvement, he doubted that Lucia would ever be able to turn for long from her “lightening-lit revery” to “that battered cabman’s face, the world.” He might soon escape the “folie of writing Work in Progress” (his manuscript title for Finnegans Wake), but the pirate publishers would pounce upon it, too — if they showed interest at all in the “monster” that had nearly killed him:

Having written Ulysses about the day, I wanted to write this book about the night…. Since 1922 my book has been a greater reality for me than reality. Everything gives way to it. Everything outside the book has been an insuperable difficulty: the least realities, such as shaving myself in the morning, for example.
Joyce’s interest in ordinary living was always, as Ellmann puts it, “erratic and provisional.” As the war came ever closer, even greater devotion — errands, money, moving him from hotel to hotel and finally helping him escape to Zurich — was required from his circle of friends and followers. Often the only effective help was companionship, for as his daytime despairs increased so did his nighttime effort to sing and drink them away. One anecdote from the end has his customary refusal to go home from the party culminating in an intricate two-step upon the stairs — these dark and narrow, his eyes as bad: “Come on, let’s dance a little…. Come on then, you know very well it’s the last Christmas.” Another old friend, a psychiatrist, offered what advice he could on the daughter and then took the father for his therapy, in this case a large restaurant-dance hall crowded with French and British troops. When they started to sing the “Marseillaise” Joyce joined in, and his impressive tenor voice so impressed that the soldiers hoisted him onto a table to sing the song again: “You never saw such an exhibition of one man dominating and thrilling a whole audience. He stood there and sang the “Marseillaise” and they sang it again afterwards with him and if a whole German regiment had attacked at that moment they would never have got through.”

Ellmann says that Joyce “forced modern literature to accept new styles, new subject matter, new kinds of plot and characterization … a new area of being and a new language.” Ellmann says also that the sometimes difficult and gloomy man must give way to his books, where he is “one of life’s celebrants, in bad circumstances cracking good jokes, foisting upon ennuis and miseries his comic vision.”

Recomended site. James Joyce: The Brazen Head – Author Homepage